Coffee a popular topic on college campuses
Professor Beau Weston listens to a discussion about coffee in the Three Babes and a Monkey cafe in Danville, Kentucky.
DANVILLE, Kentucky (AP) -- For years, sociology professor Beau Weston has held informal office hours off campus in a local coffee shop, sipping his mocha latte while advising students.
As he did, he formed relationships with other coffee shop regulars who might otherwise have remained strangers. That caused a sort of academic epiphany, and now he's one of a handful of teachers across the nation who have developed courses that study coffee and its effect on society.
Don't drop your morning cup of joe. Weston's class, offered during a recent intensive three-week term at Centre College, was hardly "Starbucks 101," although the 15 students who enrolled in "The Cafe and Public Life" could be forgiven if that was their original impression.
Audrey Rogers, a freshman from Dallas, said she initially wondered about the academic strength of the class: "I didn't know how it was going to last a week."
Weston understood such skepticism and designed his course to focus not only on coffee as a drink, but on how its consumption has changed society through the centuries.
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